The Transparency of Reality

Intellectually it may be easy to understand the idea that everyday reality is an illusion, but it often takes a good deal of prayer, meditation, or substance abuse to really feel it in your bones.

Fortunately, I sometimes find that staring at pictures helps. I took this at a bar a few days before new year's eve. I was screwing around with the slow shutter (I recommend trying this on your digital camera).

Anyway, I find for some reason that this pic captures that feeling of unreality better than any words I could use.

Oh, and the music was good too.

NEW BOOX

I finished Jared Diamond's Collapse, finally. Great book. Now I'm back to struggling with Investigations, by Stuart Kauffman. This is one smart dude. He's a biologist who unpacks who's trying to figure out the rules behind the complexity of life, and has some rather wonderful answers. But it ain't easy reading. Lots of graphs, math and some very tough prose. However, it's worth the slog, and he's clearly very passionate about what he's doing.

Okay, that's it for now. More personal stuff to come, I promise.